FatsOff's View on Banana Diet

Recently I came across a kind of diet made popular in Japan, the Banana Diet. After doing some research, I feel that I need to throw my views in about this diet plan before continuing with muscle building.

The Banana Diet has been considered as a fad diet, which means that its just a temporary solution to weight loss. There are some rules to follow:

1) Eat as many banana as you like with a glass of water/milk in room temperature for breakfast.
2) Choose whatever you like for lunch and dinner.
3) No other desserts should be consumed as snacks other than bananas.
4) No food to be consumed after 8pm.
5) You must sleep before midnight.

Banana does make one feels full. As many probably know, banana helps making our by-products out from our rear smoother. While doing this, it probably pulls some calories along before our body absorbs the calories. Banana also contains a kind of starch (resistant starch) that can increase fat-burning.

It sounds good so far. It is a good diet plan if you do it the correct way. One of the rule is that you can choose whatever you want for lunch and dinner. Of course if you eat healthily, you will achieve your target faster. The best is to know how much energy you need daily to plan your lunch and dinner. This is to prevent yourself from overeating. The other thing to look out is other important nutrients like protein and vitamins that the body needs.

So as of now, you are losing weight with this diet plan. The bad news is you have not lose much fats. True, banana has starch to increase fat-burning but this will not be fully utilised if you forgo exercising. Incorporating exercises into the diet can help you achieve your goals faster.

I personally felt that the Banana Diet by itself cannot burn off much fats. Exercises and prudent planning of lunch and dinner should be added in to enhance the overall fat burning plan.

I'll sign off for this entry. More will be coming your way. Stay tuned to FatsOff!!! =D

Body-weight Exercises for 3 Major Muscles

Muscles help to burn fats. Yes, it is true! The more muscles you have, the more fats you can burn to be used as energy to sustain the body. I will zoom into the parts that you should train to speed up fat-burning. I've actually disclosed in my previous entry that there are 3 parts to train to speed up fat-burning. Chest, back and thigh muscles are the biggest in our body.

I will zoom into each part in detail in my next few entries. For beginners, you can start training these parts at home with your own body weight. Start with these home exercises to prepare for the weight training in the later stages.

Chest: Push-ups aka Pumping
For those who have difficulty, its alright to put your knees on the ground as you do the exercise. Subsequently, when your chest muscles get stronger, there won't be any problem doing with your knees off the ground.

Back: Pull-ups aka Chin-ups
Most probably its quite hard to do this at home. For me, I use the ledge at the top of the door frame. I dun have a full grip but it is sufficient for me to carry out my workouts. I suggest beginners to go down to the fitness corners for this exercise. For those who have difficulty doing a full pull-up, try doing half pull-ups without straightening your arm. Alternatively, get a partner, bend your knees while you grip and hang on the pull-up bar with arms straight and get him/her to support by pushing your bended knees up as you pull.

Back: Back Extension
The easier back workout using body weight which can be done at the comfort of your home. Lie face down on a exercise mat or on your "tilum", cup your ears with your hand and push your upper body up using your back muscles. All the while keeping your neck "locked", do not tilt your head up while you are pushing up, it could strain your neck muscles. For those who are comfortable and beyond beginners' level, you might want to try Superman or Bird-Dog exercises to accelerate muscle building and muscle definition for your back.

Thigh: Lunges and Squats
When you bend your knees, try to make sure that you can still see your toes. If you can't, you are bending forward rather than "sitting down". And make sure your back is kept straight throughout these exercises.

Simple home exercises using body weights, thats a way to get started. And ladies, I stress again that you do not have the genres to produce huge muscles. There aint enough muscle cells to grow bulky muscles. By doing weight training, you will simply look toner and firmer.

To everyone, dun wait anymore, jump onto the bandwagon as I take you through the fat-burning journey the right way. More coming up so stay tuned to FatsOff!!! =)

Interval Training

Hope everyone had a happy CNY celebration. CNY is normally a festival where we snack and snack! So if you are here, I assume that you are looking for ways to reduce the body fats in your body. Well done for taking a step to help yourself. Yesh!

So this entry, I will introduce a method that I've been using successfully. It will be intense and requires some level of fitness. Ideally, you must already have the fitness to be able to run for an hour non-stop at fat-burning intensity to be able to pull this off.

This training method is called Interval Training. As I've shared in my last entry that the higher your exercise intensity, the lesser percentage of fats calories were being utilised but it resulted in higher overall amount of fats being burnt.

Interval training requires one to alternate between running at a very high intensity and running at a very relaxed pace. Here, I'll share with all the methods that I've been using. Normally I use distance as a gauge to decide when I would sprint and when I would slow down.

Go to a 400m running track with distance marking. Normally a stadium will have 400m running track. Jog for the first 100m, sprint for the next 100m, jog very slowly for other 100m (to recover from the earlier sprint and prepare for the next sprint) and sprint for the last 100m. This will be 1 set. Rest 5mins between each set to ensure you can perform adequately well in your upcoming set. Do 3 to 4 sets. Increase the number of sets as you become fitter.

You can also use time as a gauge if a running track is unavailable (sorry, no excuse to skip training because I always have alternatives!). Start with a slow jog for 2mins, sprint for 20s and go back to slow jogging for 2mins before signing off your 1st set with a 20s sprint. Walk for about 2mins to catch your breathe and get ready for the next set. Do 3 to 4 sets. Increase your sprint duration as you become fitter (e.g. from 20s to 30s).

As I've said before, a long jog probably utilise more percentage of fats than a sprint but a sprint would probably burn higher amount of fats. Lets take an illustration to help understanding this concept:

Jack jogged for 30mins and burnt 280cal of which 50% used were fats. Therefore 140cal comes from fats.
Let's say Jack does the above stated interval training. He done 3 sets and used 450cal of which 40% used were fats. Therefore, 180cal comes from fats.
See the difference? Interval training would accelerate fat-burning. 3 sets of interval training probably lasted less than 30mins but compared to a 30mins jog, it uses more fats calories. You will also get fitter faster. Another advantage is that your metabolism will be boosted long after your exercise ends (up to 24 hours after your run ends depending on intensity)! Low intensity exercise only burns calories while you are actually doing the exercise while high intensity exercise burns even after you've stopped your run.

Fat burning is getting easier aint it? Haha. I'll end my entry here. Will be back with more fat-burning tips. Stay tuned to FatsOff!

Happy Chinese New Year to all (But dun forget to exercise too!!!)...